One of America's most prominent black intellectuals, West earned a BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD degrees from Princeton University. He taught religion and directed the Afro-American Studies Department at Princeton prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 1994 and returned to the Princeton Department of Religion in 2002. His first scholarly book Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982), sought to fuse Christianity and Marxism. Among his other 12 books are Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (1993); and Race Matters (1993).

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